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Town Fridges at Pacific Pipe in Oakland, Calif. (Susan Ireland)
OAKLAND, Calif. – A growing army of volunteers has been taking part in an organic, grassroots effort to help feed the hungry by stocking refrigerators placed at various locations in the East Bay.
They’re called Town Fridges, with half a dozen that have popped up around Oakland and in Berkeley.Â
The fridges are filled with donated food from community members.
As part of that effort, a group of about 50 volunteers who call themselves “Love Bite Bakers” has now mobilized to help stock those refrigerators, making hundreds of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a week.
The backstory:
The founders of the volunteer group, husband and wife team Susan Ireland and Charlie Vincent, first began their work back in 2018, with the simple idea of baking cookies out of their Kensington home kitchen to donate to those in need.Â
With the help of friends and neighbors who wanted to get involved, the effort and production grew in size, and peanut and jelly sandwiches were added to the donations.Â
Charlie Vincent with Susan Ireland, founders of Love Bite Bakers. (Susan Ireland)
Especially during the pandemic, both the number of those who were hungry as well as the number of those who wanted to help were robust, according to Ireland.
The volunteers would make cookies, assemble PB&J sandwiches, collect the donated items, and bring them to various non-profit organizations the group partnered with, including Oakland-based nonprofits Rogers & Rosewater, Punks With Lunch, and Community Kitchens.
But recently, Ireland said the group saw the need to expand even more, with some of the organizations asking if the volunteers could increase the number of donated sandwiches and cookies.
“We were at the point where we were making 350 PBJs every week and then another like 500 cookies every week. And our little group just couldn’t make any anymore,” Ireland told KTVU. “So I thought then, I’m gonna start another Love Bites Baker group, that’s what we call ourselves in Oakland.”
She recently put out a request on the neighborhood social media site NextDoor.Â
The response was overwhelming, and the Love Bite Bakers team in Oakland was born.
“That was like lighting a match. It was great,” Ireland shared, adding, “So now we doubled our production. We do over 700 sandwiches a week.”
It was through the group’s work with Community Kitchens, that Love Bite Bakers learned of another way to distribute its sandwiches.
Dig deeper:
Community Kitchens delivers hundreds of meals to those in need every week through its Home Chef program, which involves working with volunteers, who are specially trained and certified, to prepare meals out of their home, so they can be donated to community members in need.Â
The non-profit has recently been trying to revive a pandemic-era program to stock refrigerators set up in underserved communities. Â
Community Kitchens told KTVU the program had been largely abandoned in recent years, so the group has been working to bring it back and expand the project.
“Town Fridges are located in neighborhoods where over 50% of the households are food insecure and 25% live below the national poverty line,” the group’s website states.Â
Berkeley Town FridgeÂ
In its effort to revive the program, the non-profit worked with a community-centered farm store in South Berkeley, Urban Farm Oasis, to set up a new refrigerator outside that business on Ashby Avenue at Sacramento Street.
The fridge was purchased by a Home Chef volunteer and started serving the community in August.Â
“People use it really actively,” Urban Farm Oasis co-owner Kate Hobbs told KTVU. She said many folks in the community have come to depend on the meals that are left by Community Kitchens, three or four times a week. Â
“The food comes and goes very quickly,” Hobbs shared, adding, “A family might come and take four of them, and they’re gone.”
People can enroll in the program and get texts when the refrigerators have been stocked by Community Kitchens volunteers.Â
The fridge at Urban Farm Oasis went up with the help of local volunteers, donors, and Community Kitchens’ Town Fridge Board Committee, the group’s co-founder Richard Mitchell shared with KTVU.
Providing quality meals
His group seeks to provide access to food in an equitable way, offering free, quality meals while treating those it serves with dignity.
“Our focus is on providing high quality meals that reaffirm the essential dignity and humanity of everyone in our community regardless of economic status,” Mitchell shared with KTVU in an email, adding, “Our Home Chefs provide meals with love that they would be proud to serve to their own families.”Â
The Town Fridge site in front of Urban Farm Oasis is currently the only one in Berkeley. The rest are in Oakland.Â
Mitchell said it’s been a great partnership with the hosts of the refrigerators. The host operates the refrigerators, paying for the electricity to keep them running.Â
PBJs to stock Town FridgesÂ
So when Ireland learned about the Town Fridges through her work with Community Kitchens, she decided they would be another avenue to distribute the donations made by the hands of her volunteers. She called the new effort the “Love Bite Fridge Brigade.”
“Our goal is to stock each of the six free Town Fridges in Oakland and Berkeley every Wednesday and Thursday with 20 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We invite you to join us by making PBJs and delivering them to a fridge of your choice once a week,’ she wrote in her post on NextDoor.Â
She also invited volunteers to send her their contact information so she could share details on how to assemble and deliver the sandwiches.
“As PBJ makers, we each prepare our 20 sandwiches in our home, and pay for the ingredients and supplies that we use. We also take responsibility for keeping our kitchens/work areas clean and follow other food safety practices such as washing our hands thoroughly before handling food,” Ireland explained in her post.Â
Other Town Fridge sitesÂ
Another Town Fridge location is outside rock climbing gym Pacific Pipe on Mandela Parkway in Oakland.Â
Two brightly painted fridges stand at the site, along with a dry food pantry, which also allows people drop off or pick up food items that don’t require refrigeration.Â
The fridges went up shortly after the gym opened at the site in 2021, prompted by the business’s desire to give back to the West Oakland community it was a part of.Â
Pacific Pipe employees ensure the fridges are kept clean and monitor them for food safety.
The donations are accessible to anybody during business hours, as the fridges are located inside a fenced-in parking lot which gets locked up when the gym closes. Â
While Community Kitchens consistently stacks the fridges at Pacific Pipe, there are others, like Love Bites Bakers, who have learned about that and the other sites and have also been contributing to them, as the grassroots effort has grown. Â
And there are those who have learned about the fridges and benefited from the acts of kindness by strangers.Â
A Pacific Pike worker explained that the concept is similar to the Little Free Library program, set up in neighborhoods across the Bay Area and around the globe, with the community both contributors and recipients.Â
Another Town Fridge has been set up in front of a home in the small residential neighborhood in East Oakland.
The stories
Dig deeper:
Ireland said she’s met people at these fridges and heard stories that reaffirm the work she and the volunteers were doing.
“It is so rewarding when we have gone to deliver our food and sometimes people meet us there, they’re coming by to check to see what’s in the fridge,” Ireland shared. “We have wonderful conversations, and it’s really inspiring to offer people food that you’ve made in your home.”
She told KTVU about a woman who teaches in San Francisco. They crossed paths and began chatting as the woman was dropping off a whole bag of leftover lunches from the school where she worked.
“She says, ‘I do this whenever I can because I also get food from the fridge to eat.’ It’s a give-and-take,” Ireland explained.
The Love Bites Bakers founder also shared a story about another woman she met at a fridge site, a mother.Â
“She came over to my car, and she said, ‘Thank you, thank you so much.’ And she was with her husband,” Ireland recounted. “She said my family and I are going to have this for dinner tonight.”
Ireland said that she learned that the woman had four kids totaling six people in the family but noticed that she only took four meals.Â
She encouraged the woman to take more, so everyone could get a meal that night.
“I said, ‘Go back,’” Ireland recalled telling the woman. “’Why didn’t you take six?’ And she said, ‘Because other people need it. Other people need to eat too.”Â
Splinter volunteer effortsÂ
And beyond those who have used their own time to fill the fridges, there were also volunteers who have assigned themselves to upkeep duties.
“Little shoots coming up here,” Ireland said, “people that just voluntarily go there and clean the fridges because the fridges get dirty.”
Increased needÂ
Amid ongoing cuts to food assistance programs, Ireland said, anecdotally, she’s observed that the need was growing in the community, with food insecurity being experienced more widely.
SEE ALSO: Free meal service set to end for senior citizens in East Bay
“People are hungrier, or we’re noticing that some people haven’t eaten in three or four days,” she shared. “I’m not gonna say it’s new, but it’s part of what inspired us or necessitated creating more sandwiches… Now we’re putting two sandwiches instead of one in the lunch bags.”
She also stressed that while the focus of helping the food insecure has often been on homeless populations, this grassroots movement seeks to serve anyone in need of food. This collective effort to fill the Town Fridges, she said, may be helping a struggling neighbor from ending up on the street.
“I know that in addition to unhoused folks, many housed people rely on them to feed themselves, their children and elderly parents living with them,” Ireland shared, adding, “I believe that stocking the fridges is one way of fighting homelessness by helping housed people afford to stay in their homes.”Â
The donated meals and sandwiches were going fast, she observed. But the response from the community has also been fast.Â
And it’s with love, that the Love Bite Bakers volunteers have been doing their work.
“The community is so eager to help and wonderful,” Ireland said. “It’s a generous community.”Â
For information on how to become a Community Kitchens Home Chef and more on the Town Fridges program, click here.Â
Volunteers interested in joining the Love Bites Bakers’ PJ&B donation effort can email susanlovebitebaker@gmail.com.Â
Peanut butter sandwich made by Love Bite Bakers. (Susan Ireland)
Town Fridge outside Urban Farm Oasis in Berkeley, Calif. (Kate Hobbs)
Town Fridge information at Urban Farm Oasis in Berkeley, Calif. (Kate Hobbs)
